Of awe-inspiring comebacks and yawn-inducing callups

Comeback kids
For most of this season, a 5-1 deficit in the early innings of a Jays game meant either walking away and getting on with your day/evening, or sticking it out and watching the Jays roll over and play dead.

But in recent weeks, this team has shown the ability to continue to chip away at the lead and swipe it away in the late innings, as exemplified by last night's 7-5 win over the Twins. Maybe it's the warm dry air that's helping some warning track shots turn into home runs, or maybe Cito really does have some sort of mystical effect on this team.

Whatever the case, and no matter how strange this might seem, the team that we the faithful are watching now looks to us like the sort of team that can actually play in a pennant race. They're nine games over .500 since Cito's arrival, so just extrapolate that over a full season. (We know it doesn't really work that way...get off of our cloud.)

There are plenty of people who have been campaigning to blow this whole team to smithereens, from the front office to the field. Watching them hang tough over the past month against the teams ahead of them in the AL standings , we wonder if a tweak or two to the roster wouldn't be enough to put them over the top.

Callups? You call those callups?
Maybe we're paying a little penance for the Jays' having called up The Great Big Giant Pasty White Hope^TM Travis Snider last week, but the callups added to the expanded September rosters yesterday were a little underwhelming and a lot familiar. We were hoping for the future of the franchise to get the call, and instead, we get a bunch of familiar faces. Shaun Marcum, Brian Wolfe, Scott Richmond? Welcome back, fellas. Curtis Thigpen? It's been a while. Brevin Mencherson? Did you guys even leave?

A minor note
Goodbye Syracuse (and good riddance for that matter). Hello Buffalo?

Life Imitates Art: Jays Win Via Videogame Ending

It was almost as if we could hear some voice from the past uttering "f-ing Gary Gaetti" after the Jays miraculous ninth inning comeback. After Halladay left the Jays in a deep hole, a lot of us did start channel surfing (that Dutton family was wonderful on America's Got Talent). But some of those recent character wins seem to have convinced this team that they are never out of a game. We're not going to recap the whole game (others have done it for us here and here),
but there are a couple of guys that deserve gold stars:

• Adam Lind - This guy was scuffling until last week. He may have even been given a reprieve when Matt Stairs had to take first to cover for the ailing Lyle Overbay. But in the past few games he has started to show why he has been such a coveted offensive player in the minors. Last night he drove in 5 runs on a HR, double, and a single. Not bad at all.
• Jason Frasor - Two innings of no hit ball late in the game. Four strikeouts on top of that. Invaluable contribution.
• Aaron Hill - The guy started and ended the six run ninth. Proof that a walk can be as exciting as a hit.

In general, we'll just say that it feels mighty good to be at one game under .500 after such a bad month of May.